NiteNumen TK 35

Got 4 of them for $40 shipped on a 'freeme deal' off Amazon with 7 day free shipping.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071S23BCS/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Very impressed with these lights. No, its not a BLF, Convoy, Nitecore, or Klarus quality, but only a notch below imo. Although 1/4 the price, none of those lights are 4 times the light the Nitenumen is. The way it comes in a nice box with a protected Panasonic 3400 battery, extra oring, lanyard, extra charge port plug, belt clip and a decent belt velcro pouch, Perfect for gifts. I've got a lot more expensive lights not packaged nearly as well...

Good quality, good anodizing, and heavy solid construction. Reflector is smooth and deep, producing a great long distance spot beam with lots of flood spill over. Didn't test lumens, but lights seem to be on par with my other 1000 lumen lights. A bright light for sure, cool white, maybe 6500 Kelvin or so. No detectable blue tint like many fake cree low price lights. I believe this to be a real cree emitter.

Tail and side switch seem to operate smooth and crisp, with a positive action. Although not square cut threads like Convoy, the threads are amazingly smooth and well cut. Maybe feel better that some square cut threads. Driver and tail switch are held in place with a brass threaded keeper, no plastic press fit keepers. Unusually good construction for a cheaper light imho.

Tested out to 2.8amp draw on highest setting. Battery is a 3400 protected button top Panasonic rewraped. All 4 of mine tested out to between 3091 to 3132 mAh with low ir. I assume without the protection circuit, not allowing them to be discharged fully, they would've been closer to the 3400mAh listed for Panasonic...

As these lights are new to me, with no long time owner experience, hoping they hold up like they seem to be early on. With the seemingly good construction and parts used I don't see why they wouldn't, but time will tell...

Might try to mod 1 of them with an XHP50.2 I've got hanging around and a driver capable of Narsil. Wondering if anyone has tried this..?

jmo

You are exactly right—these are super lights. Very versatile and useful. In fact, they beat many others of higher calibre just by having true mode memory and tactical features. It has been rebadged at least once, if not twice. It is on Amazon now as “Soonfire”, I think.

Thanks for the review.

Yup, thanks… Been using the TK35 regularly for the last week. Last nite was playing with it on my patio, its beam goes across my lake and lites up the whole side of a house 300 yards away. Incredible for a $10 light. Can hardly wait to drop in a xhp50.2 and narsil, in this seemingly good heavy heat sinked head. Maybe it would be better to drop in a xhp35…?

Just got my 2 Nitenumen lights and right away I could tell these are not cheaply built at all. In fact the machining, fit and finish, reflector quality is on par with Convoy or lumintop and easily beats astrolux.

Battery tube is thick, button and switches feels precise, threads are trapezoidal/almost square cut, driver is protected with a full size brass disk, positive contact also has a brass piece instead of the bare spring, charging port is perfectly centered, the charging port cover is designed better than thrunite’s and stays flush when closed, clip sticks securely to the battery tube and it even has a battery level indicator light.

UI is better than anything in this price range and even compares to some $80+ “tactical” lights with a non-tactical UI, and while the output doesn’t compare with a modified flashlight, this wasn’t meant to be a hotrod in the first place, but a user friendly flashlight with more than enough punch for pretty much any task.

Edit: Battery capacity measured 3,143mAh and 3,178mAh at 1A to 2.5V. They don’t seem to be protected.

The only 2 downsides to this light that the anodizing is the cheaper, shiny type and it lacks an AR coated glass, however the reflector is surprisingly clean and it produces a very tight hotspot.

The value here is just incredible, I would say this ranks highest in the bang for the buck list. Even if it was $20.




Good post, thanks for the pics, I couldn’t get my hosting site Flicker to load, and for some reason our forum doesn’t allow uploads, surprising in this day and age of massive bandwidths everywhere. But your pics are perfect.

Rewraped 1 of my 4 battery to see what was inside, a panny3400 with added protection circuit on top. Don’t know if it was my Li-500 or the protection circuit but none of them would discharge below 2.9v which is fine with me. Just the battery alone is worth 1/2 the price of admission… lol

Gave 1 as a gift to a younger girlfriend on a 9th floor condo on Miami Beach. She’d been begging me for a light for a while now, thought this usb charge, protected battery, inexpensive great light, was perfect. She already got in trouble shinning it on other buildings from her balcony. Had security there thinking she was a sniper… I tried to warn her before hand. Can’t tell a Cubanita anything, she is hot though…lol

I don't have a hot girlfriend to give one to (), but agree with all the postings above - got my pair and they are definite decent quality, easily moddable too. I got one torn down, no pics yet.

Tom,

Does this flashlight have a copper board?
They seem to handle heat real nice. Also seeing that they allow for using 2 cr123 is this driver a regulated buck?

On my second one, the blue switch light was going to blinking after approx 30 sec on high, didn’t matter the battery. Reboot and it would do the same.
Traced it down to driver ring having bad connection to body, cleaned it and problem disappeared.
Really like this light for the $ and should have gotten another set.

Thanks,
Keith

Uhhh, at work right now. You know, I disassembled one, had other lights opened/etc., lost time to work on them further, now I'm all discombobulated of what's what, so can't answer til I get home, and get back to the bench. I can recall a couple things, not all. Thought I saw a copper PCMCB, not sure if DTP.

Got distracted - just started cutting/trimming the lawn myself now (not since maybe the 80's) - bought Worx power pack tools and mower. I bought a set of 3 Worx tools (trimmer, blower, hedge clipper) refurbished and they gave me one bad 1.5 Ah, old 20V power pack. They sent me a replacement, also used, but at least it's 2 Ah. Turns out the bad one used Samsung 15Q's so replaced them with 30Q's, and now I got a spare 20V pack that's 3 Ah - better than the current 2 Ah power packs they sell! I'm assuming the 30Q's are almost as good as the 20R's, but the 20R was a hot cell when we were all using them (4-6 years ago?). The 2Ah packs hold 5 Samsung 20R's. They call 5 cells in series 20V, some manufacturers call that an 18V pack - funny... The mower came with 2 20V 4 Ah packs, but those are 2S5P packs and you install both, so effectively the mower is 40V. So I could update the two 2 Ah packs to 3 Ah, and the 4Ah packs to 6 Ah but not sure it's worth the cost and risks in re-wiring them. I think I'll upgrade the two 2 Ah packs, so this way, I'll have three 3 Ah packs so can use a pair to backup up the mower. The mower usually doesn't do the front and back lawns on the two 4 Ah packs. I'm only using new cells in these packs, hoping I'll get the longest life out of them. I'm soldering the tabs, but would rather tack weld - some good youtube vids on DIY tack welding out there - might be easily do-able. Tack welding is probably safer and better for the cells. To solder on the batt- side, you have to hold the iron tip on the battery for a few secs to get the solder to stick - might be somewhat damaging the cell or reducing it's life.

Ok, little off topic rambling... Anyways, I got pics from the TK35 tear down.

  • The MCPCB is the old cheap aluminum one, and the LED is clearly CW under the UV light.
  • though the MCPCB has 2 nice screws to secure it down, the thermal grease is the dry type that doesn't seem to give good coverage, though it's spread out pretty good.
  • The driver has the classic enclosed big coil (I think), so yes, probably is a buck. There's a small resistor inline with the LED- wire connection,probably to knock down the amps

Basic pieces:

With the nice brass driver retaining ring, no glue driver mount:

Alum MCPCB but with nice screws:

Driver with separate switch PCB - easier to mod. Notice short LED wires - must be de-soldered from the MCPCB first in order to remove the driver:

Driver details:

Switch details:

Shown with screws, nice low profile centering piece:

Look at the stock thermal grease:

And the Worx battery pack mod:

Missing pics of the newly assembled 30Q version for some reason... Pretty simple pack - I've taken apart more complicated ones, but this is the first one I've re-built. I re-used the tabs after forming them back into shape. All Cool though

[quote=Tom E]

Anyways, I got pics from the TK35 tear down.

Thanks for all the great pics and details, have not taken mine apart yet...

If the inline led resistor was bypassed how much would that increase amps..?

So, whats on the mod menu..? :D

I'm pretty sure that pair of R050's are in parallel. I can't really guess how much boost bypassing them would give. I'm usually disappointing by the bump, there's just so many factors, but you don't want to bump it too much because of stress on the components - might push it over their rated limits. Also, that old alum MCPCB is not made for high amps - you'd have to swap in a copper DTP one if you go too high.

For my mods, plan would be swap the driver, losing the charging, Anduril, and swap in a decent copper MCPCB. Not sure bout the LED - not sure if I have a SST-40 any better, or could go with a XHP50.2.

Thanks for the reply… What driver would you go with…?

I bought 2 but haven't done anything with them till the last few days. I think the SST40 won't produce any higher output than the XML2 if you leave the stock driver. However, it looks like you could get around 2000 lumens with a 3V XHP50.2 at 2.8A. Has anyone tried that mod out with this light yet?

You need closer to 5A to reach 2,000lm, you might gain maybe 100-200lm but XHP50.2 will definitely worsen the tint and beam shape.

I finished a full TK35 mod with a FET+1 driver, running Anduril, and a 5000K SST-40. Measured 140 kcd, about 1800 calibrated lumens after 30 secs. I really like the 5000K SST-40's

The tests were done with a VTC5D, measured 8.5 amps, had the springs bypassed, and kept the 20 AWG LED wires long to re-program without soldering.

@Tom E, could you show some photos of your mod to the FET+1 driver?

If I don't try that, I'm going to put a 219C, 5000K hi CRI LED on a copper MCPCB in this nice light.

Sorry just checked, I don't have any pics of the new driver. I use OSHPark drivers and reflow them myself. It's probably a std size 17 or 20 mm. I typically use the DEL OSHPark FET+1 drivers in my mods defined here: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/44006

If I get a chance, I'll take pics later and refresh my memory on this mod. I want to reflash it anyway, and turn on the Anduril feature of having power-up restore the last mode/level used used.

Ok, took some pics. I used the Cereal Killer designed driver for the ZYT-11, here on BLF: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/25299/1762. here on OSHPark: https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/8SacSyZ1

The R6 resistor is for the AUX LED's. I used a 6.8K - seems ok. White wire is for the AUX LED's, blue for the switch, and green for ground. On the switch PCB, I shorted the 2 AUX LED leads together, so the R6 off of pin #3 drives both RED LED's.

Tom, the SST40, 5000K, has got to be my favorite LED since I bought a Wild Trail D80 v2 with it. On this light, an LED & driver change is all it needs. Thank you for the pictures!

Edit: I looked at various LEDs to see which one would produce more lumens at the limited max amps of the stock driver. I went with an LH351D but with a tint of 4000K (because that's what I had plenty of). The other LEDs I had available to swap in are the Nichia 219c & XP-L HI at 5000K.

. Yeah, the 5000K SST-40 is my new favorite. Actually think'n of swapping out my XH50.2 3V triples for this LED.

The 4000K 351D is a nice one as well. Have it in a couple favorite lights.